Much of today's important business and consumer applications rely on communications infrastructures such as the Internet. Businesses and consumers need to provide protection to their network from hostile activities while being able to communicate with others via the infrastructure. For example, businesses need to be able to communicate with customers and suppliers via email. However, businesses need to minimize the amount of unsolicited and undesirable email (SPAM) delivered to endpoint devices such as computers. The protection of endpoint devices is typically accomplished by using a mail server to filter incoming mail prior to forwarding to the endpoint devices. The mail server redirects or removes the SPAM email such that the endpoint devices will not receive the email. Thus, the mail server receives and processes all the non-SPAM and SPAM emails. This process is effective when the mail server is operating below its capacity level. Unfortunately, the SPAM sources may grow very quickly via the use of Botnets that can be quickly made available to SPAM sources. As such, SPAM email processing is consuming a larger and larger percentage of the processing power of mail servers. If the mail server's processing capacity is exceeded or overloaded due to a sudden large amount of SPAM emails, then the mail servers will implement drastic actions such as denying connections. However, the connection denial process treats SPAM and non-SPAM emails the same way, thereby impacting the movement of legitimate emails for businesses.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus to provide protection for mail servers.